What Maisie Knew review

Custody drama satisfies all elements.

Source: SBS Movies

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: With the recent Gatsby-inspired hullabaloo about quality in literary adaptations, a lesson in humility is on offer in the sublime and frequently sad What Maisie Knew. Beautifully realised by long-time directing collaborators David Siegel and Scott McGehee (their 1993 debut Suture remains one of the American indie movement most underrated films), the script by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright seamlessly moves Henry James’ 1897 novel about a child neglected by selfish parents into present day Manhattan. With heart-rending detail, the film updates and yet faithfully lays bare the disasters that Beale, a self-obsessed art dealer (Steve Coogan), and Susanna, a drug-addled, fading rock star (Julianne Moore), can inflict on their seven-year-old daughter, the Maisie of the title (Onata Aprilo), that they both claim to love so much.

A lesson in humility.

Both parents can barely love themselves, of course. But nevertheless, in addition to inflicting their selfish behaviours on their daughter, the businessman and the chanteuse bring into their damaging orbits, additional satellites in the form of a nanny cum mistress cum new wife, Margot (Johanna Vanderheim) and a slacker bartender, substitute husband cum babysitter, Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgard).

Refusing to make her self-indulgent rocker more likeable than the twisted, self-destructive poet that she is, Moore gives an unmerciful – though not cruel – performance of crystal clarity. Coogan uses his established smart-arse persona well, allowing his philandering, mercurial father to visibly slip into his jocular persona just before he is about to embark on another manipulative ploy. While the script sides with the ring-in spouses, both Vanderheim and Skarsgard do well to establish their characters in the presence of such prominent scene-stealers and the undertow of emotionally dangerous waters.

It would be as neglectful as her on-screen parents to omit young actress Onata Aprilo from praise. Completely at ease on camera, Aprilo with her deep brown, Keane-like eyes, gently tugs the heart-strings as Maisie hopes against hope that she will find a true guardian in this emotional rigmarole. The directors enhance Aprilo’s performance by frequently using point of view shots to ensure the audience inhabit her child’s world. Some shots are logical and perform direct narrative functions. Other shots appear random, like a matter of fact sudden glance upwards through an apartment’s skylight that – in an echo of James’ prose – perfectly simulates a child’s arbitrary behaviour.

Throughout the film, both direction and script trusts its audience to be intelligent enough to piece its story elements together. Not that What Maisie Knew plays any guessing games. All the components of the turmoil that surrounds the young girl are precisely arranged, so that all the information is at hand when it is needed. The audience has to join the dots, just as the always watchful Maisie must. There is still plenty of room to identify with the adult protagonists, but really it is Maisie’s world. And to come to know what Maisie knows is to love and to grieve and – hopefully – to trust again.